


Treasured Possessions

by DawnlitWaters



Series: Among the honey-meal [1]
Category: Brideshead Revisited (2008), Brideshead Revisited - All Media Types
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-24
Updated: 2013-06-24
Packaged: 2017-12-16 01:46:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 477
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/856364
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DawnlitWaters/pseuds/DawnlitWaters
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Anthony Blanche doesn't have favourites, but he does have fashions and fleeting treasures.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Treasured Possessions

Anthony Blanche is a man with many, many lovers. He has at least one for all occasions, and more often than not, two or three.

He has the ones he likes to fuck.

(Which is all of them, in truth, but not all of them will let him.)

For most of his lovers, it is a sweaty reality of hot breath and skin, of pressure and sound. Of illicit couplings in bedrooms and backrooms.

For the rest, it is a decidedly one-sided phantasy, one that exists only in the mind of the man himself, and here he can afford to be less covert: he has made Sebastian Flyte scream his name from the seat of a punt or the parapet of a bridge more than once. (And it is barely the end of the first Michaelmas week.)

He has the ones he likes to show off.

(A slightly more select group: both those who will let him do far more than just kiss in public, and those who make him content himself with this alone. It excludes the ones he fucks but would rather have no one know about. Even he has some shame. )

He gentles them, flirts with them, pampers each like a favoured pet. They all know they are not his favourites – Anthony Blanche doesn’t waste time with such pedestrian limitations – but they go along to be shown off nonetheless.

This week, this glorious week in early Autumn, with the fresh blood arriving for his perusal and the lowering sun making the ancient stones of the university golden in the evenings, Anthony’s most treasured possession is the young Lord Sebastian.

(Anthony Blanche doesn’t have favourites, but he does have fashions and fleeting treasures.)

He is not, it must be admitted, _quite_ conventionally handsome. He has a certain grace of movement and a definite facial beauty, but his structure is all limbs and bone and sinew, and he is wiry where he ought to be toned.  He falls some way short of a Michelangelo.

He is also capricious. Flyte by name and flighty by nature: Anthony has yet to coax him in to bed.

He has high hopes, nevertheless.

And then Charles Ryder the artist arrives, from a school no one has heard of.

And Sebastian, who Anthony has scarce known long enough for him to be the plaything of an idle minute, let alone an hour, suddenly refuses even to consent to being shown off and made a fuss of.

It is all terribly vexatious, but Anthony knows these things well enough not to bother with jealousies and recriminations. He has been a Sebastian before, and was once even a Charles, although that was rather longer ago than he cares to remember.

And so he gives up Sebastian, who was never really his to begin with, and awaits developments.

He has other lovers, after all.


End file.
